Daily News 27 Jan 2025

Kielder Castle DCNN 2007 – A Forest Setting for a hilarious runaround from the Met Office.

55.23439 -2.58046 Met Office CIMO assessed Class 5. Installed 1949, Archived Temperature records 1/1/1959 to 18/3/2013 Manual reporting station. 22/7/2013 to 17/3/2023 as Automatic.

Kielder Castle weather station is shown as currently operational on the Met Office station listing site however, the CEDA archive shows readings seem to have stopped 17/3/2023. The site was seemingly CIMO assessed in 2023 as Class 5 and Met Office rated satisfactory also in 2023 (if their data is to be believed.) Whether or not the site is still functioning is open to debate but that does not seem to be particularly unusual in Kielder with frequent service interruptions in the past. In fact the site became the source of a quite typical Met Office runaround for another enquirer.

Firstly, this station is effectively in a forest clearing and subject to shading effects from all sides. This did not, however, seem to stop the site allegedly reporting wind speed and direction for a period though such data does not appear to be archived. As can be seen from the street view image below this was/is a very poor site and was/is consistently one of the coldest reporting sites in England. At Class 5 this was/is an unsuitable site for contributing data to the historic temperature record. Why the Met Office feels otherwise is a complete mystery to me.

Normally that would be the end of this review but then I chanced upon a truly bizarre Freedom of Information request published online on the website below – it makes for hilarious reading. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/kielder_castle_weather_station_n

All the details in full are available from the above link but to summarise:

A local resident and, presumably, amateur meteorologist (Doug Paulley) asked the Met Office for real time data to assist in his weather forecasting for the local area tourism industry. Such an audacious request for actual data had to be dismissed immediately with a classic government agency fob off. As I know to my own cost, Doug required a Freedom of Information request to attempt to squeeze blood out of a proverbial stone. He was told it was a manual station with no real time data available so, quite wrongly, he was told no such information existed. Knowing better than the Met Office he then had to tell them the station was being automated and it was this new information he was after. So the Met Office sent him another copy of their original silly reply. He corrected them, they apologised, and essentially told him that when the automation was eventually up and running he could buy the data they had on offer.

As he was seemingly running a public service (and with ever increasing delays in providing the data) it appears Doug ended up involving his MP to expedite finally getting the information and getting the initial £560 + VAT fee (for just 3 months in 2013) waived. He was somewhat disappointed not to have access to wind data as he claimed the old manual reporting unit was known to provide these but seemingly (and unsurprisingly in the location) no longer were. But then insult was added to injury, Doug discovered the hourly readings were freely available online from a German website – his frustration is clear for all to see and par for the course with the Met Office.

Doug also emphasised separately the former wind data

Unfortunately for Doug the final answer was yet another fob off. He was not going to get free readings from the Met Office even though he could get “allegedly” inferior ones i.e. not subject to Met Office quality control from third parties and only at hourly resolution and thus not guaranteed to give daily maxima and minima. The same applies to this day where Weatherobs (amongst others) will offer hourly readings across a wide range of data free of charge. I believe he just gave up at this point just short of one year after his first inquiry.

Whilst I appreciate the Met Office is a Government agency and responsible for raising some of its operating costs from commercial operations, I genuinely feel immediate recent data should not be a paid for item. Forecasting is the mainstay skill and requirement of the Met Office operation, the supply of basic raw data in arrears is hardly a major value item warranting payment. But then again as sites such as Kielder are so poor, it is hard to see what value the data has anyway.

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January 27, 2025 at 10:02AM

Daily News 27 Jan 2025

Tuesday

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January 27, 2025 at 08:59AM

Daily News 27 Jan 2025

The 1998 Boxing Day Storm

By Paul Homewood

There have been attempts to compare Storm Eowyn with the Boxing Day Storm of 1998.

Such comparisons are absurd, as the STV News Archive reported a few years ago:

Do you remember the great Boxing Day storm of 1998?

A powerful storm struck Scotland on December 26, 1998 causing widespread damage across the country.

As it hit Ireland, forecasters at the time said it was the most rapid pressure drop ever recorded.

The storm named ‘Hurricane Stephen’ developed quickly and tracked rapidly northeast on the morning of the 26th.

By midnight it was over north east Scotland. Strathclyde Fire and Rescue took over 700 emergency calls.

Large parts of Scotland lost access to electricity, with some supplies not restored until the New Year.

Six electricity companies in Great Britain declared a systems emergency as a result of the damage.

Winds hit around 110mph at Prestwick Airport with speeds of 93mph recorded in Glasgow where a large part of St Stephen’s Church’s spire in Bath Street came crashing down.

The reactors at Hunterston B nuclear power station were also shut down when power was lost.

Severe winds and sea spray had disabled all four power lines to the site. The nuclear power station was forced to declare an emergency.

https://news.stv.tv/terms-of-use#4-whose-content-is-it

The storm had already brought 110 mph winds to N Ireland. The highest gusts there last week were 92 mph at Killowen.

As for Scotland, the Met Office reported gusts of over 100 mph in places and

apart from the 100 mph measured on a hilltop, nowhere got anywhere near 90 mph during Eowyn.

But the interesting thing is the statement made by the Met Office shortly after the Boxing Day storm to the inquiry into electricity supply interruptions:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/47826/2553-boxstorm.pdf

So according to the Met Office at the time, storms like Boxing Day were likely to occur every four years on average somewhere or other in Britain, common events in other words.

Ironically the Met Office also stated that the probability of such storms would double in future!

What used to be a run of the mill event now appears to be a rarity!

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January 27, 2025 at 08:27AM

Daily News 27 Jan 2025

‘Miracle’ of Green Hydrogen Becomes Fading Mirage

From ClimateREALISM

Guest Post by Vijay Jayaraj

Fanciful dreams of green hydrogen powering the future have met reality. The cost of producing this much-hyped fuel will remain prohibitively high for decades to come, crushing hopes of its rapid adoption across industries.

Green hydrogen start-ups are shuttering operations, major projects are being shelved, and investors are retreating from what was once seen as the next frontier in “renewable” energy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone whose attention to fundamentals has not been diverted by the extravagant claims of promoters.

I spent a year in Aberdeen, Scotland, a city that operates one of the world’s first hydrogen-powered double-decker bus fleets. The cost of a one-way ticket is among the highest in the country. It doesn’t take an economist to connect the exorbitant fares to the eye-popping energy costs of producing hydrogen, which priced out ordinary commuters. An Aberdeen family of four could travel cheaper in a cab than on the bus,

Welcome to the insane world of hydrogen.

Not-So-Green Hydrogen

Governments, corporations and activists painted a utopian vision. Entire industries – from steelmaking to aviation – would be revolutionized by green hydrogen power. The EU earmarked billions in subsidies, while India and Australia announced grand plans to become global hubs for green hydrogen.

However, this enthusiasm has been dampened by unyielding barriers of economics and safety.

So-called green hydrogen is the form favored by environmentalists promoting the gas. What makes it green in the eyes of enthusiasts is the manufacturing process: the electrolytic splitting of hydrogen atoms from water with wind- or solar-generated electricity. Never mind that there is nothing “green” about these expensive, unreliable energy sources.

The latest analyses predict that green hydrogen prices are likely to remain stubbornly high for decades. The goal of achieving production costs below $2 per kilogram – the threshold for competitiveness with fossil fuels – remains far out of reach. In most parts of the world, the economics simply do not add up.

The reasons are multifaceted. One of the fundamental flaws of green hydrogen is its reliance on wind and solar energy that is expensive, intermittent and unreliable.

The entire green hydrogen cycle is also inherently inefficient.

Electrolysis remains an energy-intensive process. In some cases, producing hydrogen from wind and solar electricity and then using the gas to generate electricity for consumers results in a loss of 50% to 80% of the energy value. Add to this the energy required for compression, storage and transportation, and you have a fuel requiring massive amounts of expensive electricity to process.

Moreover, hydrogen is dangerous. Being a tiny molecule with low viscosity, hydrogen is more susceptible to leakage than natural gas and cannot be detected by human senses. Capable of igniting over a wide range of concentrations in air – between 4% and 75% – hydrogen is more volatile than currently used gas fuels. “It is perplexing that we’ll have hydrogen in our homes, businesses, buses, trucks and airports. Indoors it can rapidly turn into an explosion hazard,” warns Michael Barnard from Clean Technica.

Bloomberg’s recent exposé on green hydrogen lays bare the financial toll of the misplaced optimism. Start-ups that once boasted billion-dollar valuations are now scaling back or shutting down altogether. Over a fifth of European clean hydrogen capacity is now either stalled or canceled.

In the UK, British Petroleum and Orsted have ditched green hydrogen plans and three hydrogen transportation firms have declared bankruptcy. Predicting a “bloodbath” this year for hydrogen transportation, Barnard said that “the reality sunk in that hydrogen would remain too expensive, fuel cell vehicles would remain unreliable, and actual greenhouse gas emissions were much higher than hyped.”

Investors are losing patience as promised cost reductions fail to materialize and companies struggle to deliver commercially viable projects.

The story of green hydrogen’s fall from grace is eerily reminiscent of past technological bubbles. We saw similar patterns with first-generation biofuels and concentrated solar power. Each time, the lesson is the same: we must be wary of silver-bullet solutions that promise to solve all our energy challenges without confronting the fundamentals of physics and economics.

Originally posted at RealClearEnergy.org, reposted with permission.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the UK, and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.